Restrictions on Aliens in the United Kingdom, 1914-1919 : a Study of the Origins and Political Background of the Aliens Restrictions Acts of 1914 and 1919.

At first glance the Aliens Restriction Act of 1914, which was introduced and passed on the first day of World War One, seems a hasty and ill-prepared piece of legislation. Actually, when examined in the light of Arthur Marwick's thesis that war is a forcing house for pre-existent social and governmental ideas, it becomes clear that the act was not after all the product of hastily formed notions. In point of fact it followed the precedent of detailed draft clauses produced in 1911 by a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence established to consider the treatment of aliens in the event of war. Indeed the draft clauses and the restrictions embodied in the 1914 act were strikingly similar to restrictions on aliens legislated in 1793. Hostility to aliens had been growing from 1905 to 1914 and this hostility blossomed into xeno-phobia on the outbreak of war, a crucial precondition for the specifically anti-enemy fears of the time. In 1919 the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Bill was introduced into parliament to extend temporarily the provisions of the 1914 act thus permitting the Home Secretary to plan permanent, detailed legislation. Two minority groups of MPs with extreme views on the treatment of aliens were prominent in the debates on this bill. The extreme Liberal group which advocated leniency in the treatment of aliens had little effect on the final form of the bill, but the extreme Conservative group, which demanded severe restrictions on aliens, succeeded in persuading the government to include detailed restrictions. Despite its allegedly temporary nature, the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act of 1919 was renewed annually until 1971.

Leaving and Coming Back to Canada : Evidence from Longitudinal Data (Working Paper 32)

The paper exploits the unique strengths of Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Administrative Database ("LAD"), constructed from individuals' tax records, to shed new light on the extent and nature of the emigration of Canadians to other countries and their patterns of return over the period 1982-1999. The empirical evidence begins with some simple graphs of the overall rates of leaving over time, and follows with the presentation of the estimation results of a model that essentially addresses the question: "who moves?" The paper then analyses the rates of return for those observed to leave the country - something for which there is virtually no existing evidence. Simple return rates are reported first, followed by the results of a hazard model of the probability of returning which takes into account individuals' characteristics and the number of years they have already been out of the country. Taken together, these results provide a new empirical basis for discussions of emigration in general, and the brain drain in particular. Of particular interest are the ebb and flow of emigration rates observed over the last two decades, including a perhaps surprising turndown in the most recent years after climbing through the earlier part of the 1990s; the data on the number who return after leaving, the associated patterns by income level, and the increases observed over the last decade.